A builder putting up 9 houses pays £610 for each one. A builder putting up 10 houses — just one more — pays £659 for every single unit in the scheme, not just the extra plot. That threshold is the first thing worth understanding about new build fees, because it can genuinely change the arithmetic of a project by thousands of pounds over what looks like a small difference in scale.
Unlike a home extension, where the fee is one flat number regardless of size, a new build application is priced entirely around scale — how many homes, or how much land.
👉 Use the calculator to confirm your exact fee
The banding structure
- Up to 9 dwellings: £610 per dwelling
- 10 to 50 dwellings: £659 per dwelling
- Over 50 dwellings: £32,578, plus £196 for each additional dwelling, capped at £427,537
A 9-home scheme costs £5,490 in total fees. A 10-home scheme costs £6,590 — a jump of £1,100 for a single additional plot, because every unit moves into the higher band together.
Two ways to apply, and they’re priced completely differently
You don’t have to submit full, detailed plans straight away. You can apply for outline permission first — establishing whether the site is acceptable in principle — before committing to architectural drawings.
Outline applications aren’t charged per dwelling at all. They’re charged by site area:
- Under 0.5 hectares: £610 per 0.1 hectare
- 0.5 to 2.5 hectares: £659 per 0.1 hectare
- Over 2.5 hectares: £16,291 plus £196 per 0.1 hectare above that, capped at £213,769
If outline permission is granted, the detailed design stage — Reserved Matters — follows separately. Provided the full fee was already paid at outline stage, Reserved Matters is capped at £610, regardless of how many homes are involved.
Why would anyone choose the outline route, if the total cost ends up similar?
Because it isn’t really about the fee. It’s about where the risk sits.
A full application that gets refused has already cost you complete architectural drawings, access plans, landscaping design — real money spent on detail that never gets built. An outline application refused at the same stage has cost you far less, because none of that detailed work was commissioned yet.
For a straightforward site with an obliging council, this distinction barely matters. For a contested or unusual site, it’s often the deciding factor in how a developer chooses to proceed — not the fee difference, which tends to be minor.
Two builders, two totals
Builder A puts up 12 houses on a 0.6 hectare site through a single full application: 12 × £659 = £7,908.
Builder B, on an identical site and scheme, applies for outline permission first. Site fee: 0.5 hectares at £610/0.1ha (£3,050), plus the remaining 0.1 hectare at £659 (£659) — £3,709 at outline stage. Once granted, Reserved Matters is capped at £610, since the full fee was already paid. Combined total: roughly £4,319.
The totals land close to each other either way — the real difference between Builder A and Builder B isn’t the money, it’s when each of them found out whether the council would say yes.
The cost that isn’t in this calculator at all
None of the figures above include the Community Infrastructure Levy, a separate charge many councils apply to new housing, set locally rather than nationally. On anything beyond a handful of homes, CIL frequently dwarfs the planning fee itself — which makes it a genuinely risky thing to leave out of a budget, even though it has nothing to do with the application fee this calculator works out.
Check your council’s current CIL charging schedule directly before treating the planning fee as your full cost.
For the official fee schedule, see Gov.uk: Fees for planning applications. For guidance on choosing between outline and full applications, see Planning Portal.
Whichever route fits your scheme, the calculator above will work out the exact figure once you know your dwelling count or site area.